Google me: I won't be in today because...

By JULIET ROWAN

Pulling a sickie can be tempting at the best of times, but particularly if you are rostered to work a public holiday when everyone else seems to be off having fun or relaxing at home.

The idea of wagging work on a public holiday became even more appealing to some last week, when it emerged that under the new Holidays Act anyone calling in sick on Queen's Birthday is entitled to public holiday pay.

Business New Zealand was not impressed, labelling the law "a dog's breakfast" and calling for an urgent review. Meanwhile, the meat industry reported a fourfold increase in sick leave since the act came into force in April.

So with all the controversy over sickies, be they genuine or fake, the Herald decided to make them the subject of this week's Google column and see what the world wide web had to say.

Punching "sickies" into the search engine produces 24,700 results, many of them articles about workers taking sick leave and the economic cost.

A BBC story from last month says British workers took 176 million sick days last year, costing their country £11.6 billion ($34 billion).

Of those days, 15 per cent, or 25 million, were thought to be the result of people feigning illness.

Depressing reading for employers, but neither should they overwork employees and create an environment in which workers feel they can't take a genuine sick day.

A study cited in a report by Australia's Channel 7 found people who turned up when ill or unmotivated cost companies three times as much as if they threw a sickie.

But even so, if you're an employee contemplating a sneaky day off, you're going to need a good excuse.

For pearls of wisdom, head to "the definitive guide to bunking off work".

It's hard to argue with logic like this: "The most tried-and-tested excuse is always some kind of disease. Make it something messy or contagious, and they'll be relieved to see your empty desk."

That appears in the "being poorly" category of fake excuses. Other categories are emergency medical visits, transport trauma and domestic duties.

The web also tells us that sickies are not just sickies in the New Zealand sense of the word.

"Sickies" can also be slang for dirty thoughts, actions or people, and for feeling sick (like "I've got the sickies"), which appears in several online diary entries, including one entitled "Ickies and Sickies".